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Seven Words of Christ

Pergolesi: Septem Verba A Christo

The history of the oratorio “Septem verba a Christo in cruce moriente prolata “is as shrouded in mystery as its probable creator. The title of the work and the assertion of Pergolesi’s authorship have haunted musicological circles for a century or so; initially the question was raised on the sole basis of an incomplete manuscript catalogued in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek since 1882 and regarded as genuine. However, the recent discovery in 2009 of two more manuscripts in the abbeys of Kremsmunster and Aldersbach by musicologist Reinhard Fehling seems to have settled the issue of authenticity once and for all and “Breitkopf and Härtel” had the score printed in a critical edition. The director Réne Jaocobs immediately spotted the qualities of the music and in July 2012 Pergolesi’s lost masterpiece was given its concert première at the Beaune Festival. Shortly after it was recorded after by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, led by René Jacobs.

The Seven Words of Christ is a cycle of seven cantatas, each consisting of two arias. Recitatives are kept to a minimum. The music is scored for four solo vocalists, trumpet, two horns, harp, strings and a basso continuo. Essentially a dialogue between Christ on the Cross and the “Anima” (the faithful soul), it is a hauntingly beautiful spiritual exercise. Featured soloists include soprano Sophie Karthaüser, counter-tenor Christophe Dumaux, tenor Julian Behr and bass-baritone Konstantin Wolff. Especially Christophe Dumeaux presents us with a excruciating meditation, but in each their own way the soloists must be applauded for their ability to convey the pain involved in this special kind of Easter Music.

Even though the question of parentage is still questioned by some it is clear that the music has such profound qualities, that the composer has to have been on par with Pergolesi. And few are although at least 16 composers have written musical settings of the Seven Last Words, for various combinations of voice and/or instruments. The best known of these settings is probably that by Joseph Haydn, who composed an instrumental meditation, which was commissioned for Cadiz in Lent. Haydn later arranged it as an oratorio and for string quartet, and approved his publisher’s arrangement for solo piano.

Another famous composition is by Heinrich Schütz.

 Septem verba a Christo
Composer:  Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
Performers:  Konstantin Wolff, Julian Behr, Christophe Dumaux, Sophie Karthäuser
Conductor:  René Jacobs
Orchestra/Ensemble:  Academy for Ancient Music Berlin
Label:  Harmonia Mundi   Catalog #: 902155   Spars Code: DDD

 Try out a tiny bit of the music at YouTube

Royal Affair

In 1766 Christian VII was crowned king of Denmark, just weeks before his 17^th birthday. Although earlier accounts agree that he was both bright and charming, he was brutally terrorized by his governor, who was left with free reigns by a drunkard of a father, Frederik V. As his mother (who died when he was two years old) was a much beloved English princess, his father contracted another English marriage with Caroline Mathilde, a sister to king George III. They were married by proxy in 1766.

Cristian VII

The Danish king, however, suffered from some sort of mental illness or at least a crippling mental immaturity caused by his blighted childhood. After having fathered a son in 1768 he left for a European tour to Altona, Paris and London. At his side was a physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee, whom the king depended heavily upon. After the king returned in 1769 Struensee became part of his retinue. During the next year the physician slowly gained ground as the prime confidante of the king and the lover of Caroline Mathilde. From September 1770 he de facto governed Denmark, working to install a number of visionary reforms, amongst those the abolition of censure.

On 7 July 1771 Caroline Mathilde gave birth to a daughter who is generally considered the child of Struensee. At the same time popular opposition, fanned by the old “aristocratic party”, published a series of wicked pamphlets while the inner circle around the dowager queen and the half-brother of the king staged a coup. During the night of the 16^th and 17^th of January she and Struensee were both arrested. He was later condemned to death and executed with an accomplice in 1772, while she was divorced from the king and sent in exile in Celle in Germany. From there she tried to manoeuvre herself back on the throne, but in 1775 she suddenly died. She never saw her children again. From 1772 until 1784 the dowager queen, Juliana Maria, governed the country with the help of her close conspirator, Ove Høegh-Guldberg. In 1784, when the crown-prince was 16 he gained his majority, and staged another coup. The last remnants of the 18^th century were characterised by major reforms, not least the abolition of serfdom; reforms, which Struensee had advocated.

Caroline Mathilde

This story has recently been made into a delightful film, A Royal Affair,which premiered at the Berlin film festival  and won two silver bears: Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg got one for the manuscript, while Mikkel Bøe Folsgaard won a bear for his role as Christian VII. The film will be released in nine different European countries during the spring and summer 2012.

Places to visit in Copenhagen

The film is expected to create a demand among cultural tourists to experience the places where the royal drama unfolded. Although the main parts of the royal palace in Copenhagen burned in 1794, part of it still stands, amongst those the show-grounds with the royal theatre and the stables. In the stables is exhibited the saddle of Caroline Mathilde, which she used for riding dressed as a man; something she was spurred on by Struensee and which is showcased in the film. Also the Royal Theatre may be visited, where she danced for the last time with her lover on the fateful night on the 16th of January 1772 as well as the place where they were arrested – Kirkeløngangen; alas only from outside.

Visiting this summer it is perhaps worth while to know that the Royal Archives have mounted a small exhibition where a very special pair of garters may be viewed. Normally they are kept in the royal collection as part of the divorce proceedings. Apparently they were a gift from Struensee to the queen.

Struensee

Further off it is worth going on a guided tour of the Palace of Christian VII at the Royal Palace of Amalienborg. Although Caroline Mathilde never lived there – the royal family moved there after the fire in 1794 – it has been beautifully restored by the present queen, and gives a sense of what life was like in Copenhagen at that time.

Further a visit to two churches must be on the agenda: Kastelskirken, which harbored the prisons of state and where Struensee and his accomplice, Brandt, were incarcerated; and St. Petri, where the alleged remains of Struensee and Brandt were illegally taken after the execution, although they were sentenced to rot on the gibbet. In the film they are decapitated, but in reality their right hands were cut off first before the decapitation.

Still fascinated by the story?  Then it is time to visit Rosenborg Castle, where some pieces of jewelry and clothes may be seen and further to go op north of Copenhagen to Hørsholm, where one of the royal summer palaces was situated at that time. During the summer of 1771 the king, the queen and her lover all stayed there. Afterwards it fell into disrepair and in 1810 the now dilapidated palace was demolished in order to use the building materials for the new Christiansborg. Left is the Royal Chapel. On the left side of the moat there is a small museum with a remarkable collection of the pamphlets and other memorabilia from the lives of Caroline Mathilde and Struensee.

Unfortunately not many scholarly works on the Royal Affair have been translated into English. However, it might be worthwhile to read the novels of Per Olov Enquist: The Visit of the Royal Physician, Harvill Press 2002 ,  and Norah Lofts: The Lost Queen, New York: Doubleday, 1969.

Passion in Prague

One of the more evocative places in Prague is the Jewish churchyard and the Altneuschul, the oldest active synagogue in Europe. Built in gothic style in 1270 it was the scene of a terrible pogrom in 1389.

That year was especially dangerous for the Jewish community as the Jewish Pesach (Passover) and the Christian Pasqua (Easter) coincided. Traditionally, this made mob violence more likely as Christians became enflamed by the hateful renderings of the Passion of Christ with the medieval tradition for virulent blaming of the Jews, while the Jews were busy organising their festivities; amongst those the baking of matzoh, which dough Christian myth claimed was mixed with the blood of Christian children.

As usual the Jews were forbidden to appear in public between Holy Thursday and Easter. However, the Jewish quarter in Prague was at this time (as later) crammed with people some of which were Christians and at some point on Holy Saturday a procession worked its way through the tiny allies carrying the host to a dying Christian. Somehow this became the proverbial spark when the Christians afterwards claimed that stones had been thrown at them, spilling the host on the ground. Whatever the truth behind this, it ended in
a terrible tragedy as some of the Jews were hauled into town in or- der to be punished. Come Easter Sunday Christians, not satisfied with this, swarmed into the Jewish quarter armed with stones, swords and axes. After the quarter was set ablaze, the Jews took refuge in the Altneuschul, where they started to “sanctify the name” (Kiddush ha-Shem) by killing first their children and afterwards themselves. Rather than submitting to a down- right massacre or forced baptisms this was the traditional way out since Roman persecutions.

The death toll has recently been calculated to be around 4 – 500, approximately half to two-thirds of the Jews in Prague at that time.

And then the looting began. Unfortunately the king, who was highly dependent on the income from the taxation of the Jewish Community, afterwards ordered the amassed valuables delivered at the castle. One source claimed that values to the amount of five barrels of silver ended up in the coffers of the king. Some even hinted at the king having been personally involved in the instigation.

The pogrom in Prague does not fall into the general pattern of European pogroms, neither the early ones connected with the crusades and perpetrated by Muslims as well as Christians or the later wave prompted by the Black Death. It was just one of those recurrent infamous events, which from time to time would blot the history of medieval Europe. But which it is especially important to remember in so far as people today can go and visit the actual place, where the horrendous killings took place. Even today a special lament or elegy, Et Kol ha-Tela’ah asher Mea’atnu, composed by Rabbi Avigdor Kara after the killings, is read at Yom Kippur in Prague. Another reason to remember this particular pogrom is a text, which was produced in the after- math: The passion of the Jews in Prague, which has recently been the object of a meticulous study by the church historian Barbara Newman.

This curious text – the Passion
– must be classified as a parody, although it in no way possesses the humorous aspects, which we connect with this genre. Nevertheless, it is still a parody in so far as it tells the story of the events in 
Prague with the Jews in the role of Jesus, but with the added twist, that the killing of them (as opposed to him) was totally righteous!

Source for the parody are texts from the bible, primarily the gospels of St. Mathew and St. John, from which lengthy passages are picked, and transformed. Over 90 biblical verses are cited, although often reversed or twisted. For instance the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane is reversed like this: While the actual saying (according to Matthew) is “Yet not as I will, but as you will”, the ringleader of the Christian mob exclaims that the outcome of the violence, will not be as the Jews “want, but as we will”.

According to Barbara Newman such twisting creates a literary space for the reader, who is constantly reminded of the radical nature of the “real” passion, which echoes the story about the passion of the Jews in Prague. Onone hand there is the Passion in Prague about the Jews, who the mob believed “had it coming”, a bunch of mercenary rioters and the ruthless magistrates. On the other hand there is the Passion of Christ.

Newman is of the opinion that this sounding board – the biblical passion – radically undermines the points, the author of the Prague Passion tried to make. She believes, that the anonymous author “saw the events in Prague as renewing the Savior’s vengeance against the Jews”. In Barbara New- mans words, the formula for the parody, which he picked – the passion of Christ – created a “textual unconscious that, despite the author’s best efforts, allows the grace of irony and pity to seep through”.

Whether the anonymous author was conscious about this – which is not the opinion of Barbara New- man – is not easy to ascertain in
so far as the Passion is currently unavailable apart from a translation into Czech. In her forthcoming book: “Medieval Crossover: Reading the secular against the Sacred”, we are promised a translation into English and the possibility of addressing these questions will become widely possible.

Which is important. One reason is the curious fact, that one of the manuscripts containing the Passion from Prague, according to Barbara Newman, stems from the Cathedral and contains a number of anti-Hussite works.

It is well known that the early protestant reformer Jan Huss, 1369 – 1415, is presumed to have had friendly dealings with the Jews in Prague and especially the afore- mentioned Rabbi Avigdor Kara. And on the gravestone of Avigdor Kara – the oldest in the cemetery in Prague, his father is given the epithet of martyr. He was presumably killed in the massacre.

One wonders, whether the parody was more than just a parody on the Passion of Christ. Maybe it was an elegant parody on the hate-speech of the burghers in Prague around 1400. One might even wonder: Did Jan Huss or one of his friends write it? Presumably he was already studying at the University during the fateful Easter of 1389 and must have seen the happenings up close. And felt disgusted!

The Passion of the Jews of Prague. The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody. Barbara Newman
Church History, 2012  81: 1-26

Gentile Tales. The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews. By Miri Rubin. University of Pennsylvania Press 2003

Jewish Heritage in Prague

The Rylands Haggadah

From the calling of Moses to the crossing of the Red Sea, the drama of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is presented in The Rylands Haggadah.

The Haggadah is one of the central texts of Rabbinic Judaism. Its use on the first nights of Passover by Jews all over the world from Alaska to Zimbabwe continues a tradition reaching back into antiquity. The so-called Rylands Haggadah is a masterpiece from 14^th century Catalonian Spain. During the last eight months it has been painstakingly conserved in order to preserve the pigment and gold, which was starting to flake. Comprising 57 lavishly decorated vellum leaves, the treasure was acquired by Enriqueta Rylands in 1901, as part of the world famous Crawford collection of manuscripts. Normally it resides at the John Rylands University Library at Manchester University.

However, from March till September 2012 the precious “Rylands Haggadah” will be exhibited at the Metropolitan in New York. Each month, the Haggadah will be open to a different page, affording visitors the exceptional opportunity to follow the artist’s telling of the Exodus story. Works of art from the Museum’s own collection, made for Christian use but depicting the saga of the Hebrew people, will suggest the larger, medieval context of biblical storytelling in which the Haggadah was created.This is the third in a series of installations focusing on one masterwork of Hebrew manuscript illumination from a national or international collection.  The previous installations featured the Washington Haggadah (on view April 5–July 4, 2011) and Lisbon’s Hebrew Bible (on view November 22, 2011–January 16, 2012).

“This manuscript is one of the finest Haggadot in the world. It is important for its intrinsic beauty and for various textual details, but it is also a key source for the study of the illumination of Hebrew manuscripts in general. It shines a light on the tradition of Biblical illustration among the Jews of the Middle Ages and on the cross-fertilisation between Jewish and non-Jewish artists within the medium of manuscript illumination, said Rylands Collections and Research Support Manager John Hodgson recently to Manchester University News.

The installation in New York is made possible by The David Berg Foundation.

The Rylands Haggadah
Medieval Jewish Art in Context
The Metropolitan, New York 
March 27–September 30, 2012

Digitised edition of the Ryland Haggadah

Fish Fight Anno 1000

Last year celebrity cook, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, called for a pan-European Fish Fight. The aim was to get the European Council to ban the discards of side-catched fish, daily thrown overboard due to the current system of quotas. As of now nearly 800.000 people have signed this petition on www.fishfight.net.

Last week (19.03.2012) the question of discards was discussed at a meeting in the European Fisheries Council. Although there was general agreement about the issues at stake, the Southern European member states once more argued for a complex step-by-step approach. The conclusion was that there was a need to identify species, which should be exempt from the general ban; species, which were not threatened with overfishing and thus not endangered by the habit of discard. It seems, however, that the question was not raised, why such by-catch should be discarded at all. If the fish taken as by-catch does not belong to threatened species, could it not just be landed? To the suspicious Europeans it all sounds very much as a way to once more find a loophole for allowing the praxis to continue. Add to this the fact that the Commission a few days before had (once more) fined Spain for overfishing of horse-mackerel, blue whiting and monkfish and imposing the fines on individual boats. However, representatives of the Spanish fishing industry said that these fines converted to cuts would only lead to an increase in discards, as horse-mackerel is often caught as by-catch.

Vasa Run

Each year thousand of skiers gather at Sälen in Sweden to ski the 90 km to Mora in Dalarna in commemoration of the Swedish king, Gustav Vasa who made his escape there in 1520 dressed as a peasant.

He had been on the run for weeks trying to escape from the Danish troops in order to raise a rebellion against the Tyrant Christian II, king of Denmark, Norway and Sweden

The story behind the famous flight was the escalation of the wars between Sweden and Denmark in the beginning of the 16^thcentury. After a successful invasion in the autumn of 1520, the king had assembled the Swedish aristocracy and high-ranking clerics to what they thought would be a conciliatory meeting in Stockholm. Instead it ended in a bloodbath, where 80 -90 persons were executed. As of today it is disputed to what extent is was the king or his troops, who planned the actual killing.

Amongst the beheaded were the parents of Gustav Vasa. To escape this fate he took to the North in order to rally the peasants to rebel. As the story goes he came to Mora and tried to entice the men, but first they declined. Later they changed this decision and two men were sent after the later king. They caught him at Sälen and returned to Mora, where they began to rally around him.

The race was first run in 1922, inspired by the run by King Gustav Vasa in 1520.

Mora
In itself Mora is well worth visiting. An old trading place near the river Österdalen, it is known for its traditional handicrafts – the Mora-knife, the darlar-horses and other woodcarvings.

The artist Zorn was born there and he amassed a huge collection of traditional material culture and buildings from the countryside. Today his paintings may be enjoyed in the Zorn Museum, while his collections can be seen at the Open-Air Museum called Zorns Gammelgaard. It was Zorn who created the memorial statue of Gustave Vasa erected in Mora.

Another place, where the tradition is kept alive is in Ornäs, where the king tried to find shelter. The manor dating from the 15^th century can still be seen.

Read more about Gustav Vasa in:
Lars-OlofLarsson: Gustav Vasa. Landsfader eller tyran? Prisma 2002. (In Swedish)

Open-Air Museum in Mora, Zorns Gammelgaard

Map of the traditional places, where the future king tried to find support and shelter  and with the route of Vasaloppet 

Corsican Goats

Goats from Corsica represents unique inheritance and an important genetic resource

Goats were one of the first species to be domesticated. It happened in the near east about 10.500 years ago. Dispersing Neolithic humans took their livestock with them while on travel into Europe, moving their goats to locations, where their wild ancestor, the bezoar, never reached. Most goats nowadays are the result of genetic mixing on a large scale. However, animals on islands present a unique opportunity to study isolated old breeds.

Recently the goats on Corsica underwent a series of genetic studies in order to throw some light on the process of domestication. The reason is that goats on Corsica are herded in a specific way: Even though goats are left to roam freely around the wild rocky terrain, a good herder will try keep related females together, with unrelated males from time to time introduced in order to prevent inbreeding. Such families tend to ease the work of keeping a herd together while it roams the mountains. A good herder will also be observant of the colours of his goats, as this eases his job of spotting them in the mountains.

The researchers sampled DNA from 28 present-day goats as well as DNA from 29 bones from an archaeological dig at Rostino. The modern samples were drawn from five different herds at five different locations. The analysis of combinations of gene sequences located in close proximity on the chromosomes showed that about 46% of both medieval and modern Corsican goats differed significantly from all other groups (but not from each other), suggesting that they constitute an important endemic variety.

The identification of such rustic groups of animals are important, because they constitute a kind of genetic reserve. Over the past 80 years, however, the Corsican Goat population has dropped from over 200.000 animals to only 30.000.

A Dig into the Past Mitochondrial Diversity of Corsican Goats Reveals the Influence of Secular Herding Practices